Resilience of constructed assets against natural extreme events from the engineering standpoint

Abstract

The safety of people and the high value of constructed assets and their contents, as well as their criticality in fulfilling the basic needs and the well-being of communities, have always prompted concerns regarding the built environment sustainability, resilience and reliability. The constructed assets’ resilience is often linked with policymaking and strategies for the built environment in the aftermath of catastrophic or traumatic events. It is a multi-dimensional concept covering physical (e.g. quality of building design and construction), infrastructural (e.g. lifelines), environmental (e.g. natural hazards), economic-social (e.g. impacts on local communities), political-regulatory (e.g. building codes and standards) and organizational aspects (e.g. decision making strategies). Assuring the simultaneous fulfilment of these needs is key to the achievement of the Sustainable development Objectives (ODS). This is a challenge involving different stakeholders across all constructed assets life-cycle stages. This paper addresses the resilience of constructed assets against natural disasters from an engineering standpoint, namely with regards to building structural safety and serviceability. It presents risk-informed performance-based parameterization strategy and evaluation criteria to consider different levels of structural safety and serviceability in constructed assets against natural disasters.